Tall buildings and rich snobs

Well we had our trip to london yesterday which involved shooting our “Plates” for the project we are working on. We first swung by donwntown central to see if we could get a shot from the famous Tower 42. Unfortunately we were promptly denied by the extremely unhelpful secretary who appeared to look at us like we had pissed on her kids on christmas day. She told us there was a charge to even sit in the champagne room which was ten pounds. And also that the rich snobs needed to relax so we couldnt use the room for photography regardless, because obviously a small nikon cameras clicks would evidently disturb their extremely complicated thought process of smelling their own farts and comparing eachothers d… business cards.

We became slightly disheartened after the endevour because the chances of us getting a high point seemed quite slim in that district, considering we felt under dressed by simply walking through the street filled with black velvet suits worth more than my entire wardrobe. So we decided to take a shot from one of the london bridges to walk away with something just in case we couldnt get anything. We even approached one of the buildings on the london bridge asking if they knew anywhere that would let us take a shot. They where thankfully quite helpful and pointed us to the OXO tower.

The OXO tower staff were extremely helpful and let us use thie rpublic viewing gallery, hardly any questions asked! They were extremely keen to help us, finally somewhere in london that wasnt stuffed up its own bum.

We managed to get some great shots from above which has basically covered at least 7 landmarks of London. Two of which includes the tower 42 and the Gurkhin. We did multiple wide panel shots ready to be composited together for the curved screen. On the day the lighting was fantastic because there wasnt too many shadows or any rain mist. The overcast sky was just about perfect so we struck the lucky charm with this one.

We took a while to find the tower through the tube, managed to have some mishaps with some navigation technology but all in all it was an extremely successful trip for the project. I felt a lot better when we got those high up shots from the OXO tower. I think the whole team did a fantastic job yesterday, i cant wait to get into the compositing.

Lets start walking on some sunshine..

Another fail day..

Well today didn’t really go that well either, considering i don’t really have much to show involving the shatter effect in Maya. Which by the way is a pile of horse crap. Anyways, i wanted to of control of seperate segements instad of having the whole shape shatter. This would mean i could break chunks off at any point at my desired will. I started thinking about tricking the idea of shatter and duplicating a piece into the shape.

I started extruding into the shape to start creating a defined chunk where the initial crumble and explosion would be. This is simply the basics for it which just involve using the extrude tool.

You can see here the shape being more defined.

Here is the shape looking again a lot more defined then duplicated. then the duplicate piece is then put back into the building as the back texture which would of been textured later.

And here you can see the chunk properly formed out of the wall. Unfortunately ….shatter wont work…after a lot of constructing it just simply doesn’t want to work. Because its rubbish. Whoever invented shatter should be ashamed, i mean really. Why create a tool which doesn’t do what you ask it to? People have been saying it may be how complicated the polygons are. So great, would that mean i could only shatter a perfect shape? What’s the point in that? Its as useless as a chocolate teapot is what i am trying to say….so i must pray and hope i can find a solution. Bugger nuts

Apple crumble..

Well i cracked it!! I managed to find out how to shatter objects and have attributes affect them! It was some really small reasons why i couldnt use the shatter effect in the first place. Apparently i had to reset the shape history first and then modify the freeze transformation. Two simple procedures which then let me create a shatter effect on be able to affect different segements of shards to my will. Even apply them as emmitters for smoke and such.

So i simply made a rectangle representing the tower and also a plane for the piece to fall on. The plane had to be set as a passive rigid body. So that such factors like maya built in ambient gravity wouldnt affect it unless i gave the word to. Which means it will stay solidly in place. Then on the rectangle i applied the shatter affect turning the shards into rigid bodies without collision properties. About 20 segements seemed enough, although quite render intensive.

You can see the shattered polygons which makes selection a little difficult. Thats why im using the outline editor. Love that tool. But yeh once the gravity field is linked to the tower the physics then cause the tower to crumble into the rigid plane and bounce off of it. Its a fantastic tool and i wish to perfect its animation, like doing only sgements of a building. Although that may be tricked by simply using over lapping 3d layers.

The rigid plane also has attributes to be tweaked like say bounce and fricition. I tweaked the bounce to 0 because to be honest, heavy pieces dont bounce unless more shatter animalies are created, which might mean i could layer multiple shatter effects onto this? Would call for keyframing.

I found today to be rather successful consdiering the amount of blunders that happened. Heck i even crashed Maya beyond belief somehow to the point of my computer shutting down. Wasnt even anything render intensive, must look into that. But yes thats the basics of shape shatter in Maya. Now lets start tweaking it.

Thinking about CGI and an itinerary of ze week

Right looking into the animation of the 3d explosion it involves expression control so at least thats one mystery taken care of. Also in terms of its scale i have also realised the whole fluid container should be regarded as the emitter. Very silly mistakes of mine but after some sly work today its become apparent they should be easy to manipulate. My next step is to try shattering objects to create debris and also to think about smoke. Although Elliott appears to be against compositing smoke using layers i am all for it. Most smoke scenes are composited and i reckon it’sd just be pointless render time to include smoke into Maya. Sorry man hahaha.

Also location shoot. We should be travelling to london this week so we need to obviously consider what would be in the view and how we would alter it. Well considering we will be taking flat panels and doing some editing in photoshop we decided to start doing some designs of architecture in the near future. I dont think it should be anything too futuristic, it’d lose that whole “london” feel. Although of course i’d rather discuss that with Elliott and Phil first because they both have their own opinions on the architecture of the scene. The day will also need an itinerary of places we can go and back up routes, just so we dont walk away empty handed if things go pear shaped. We also need to get our bookings this week for the coach tickets.

Also there may be the possibility of seeing the installation workspace tommorow and taking some photography so we know what to deal with in terms of the actual installation piece. Health and safety will have to be considered and also the size of the piece as well. We also this week need to think about maybe doing some material research on what we need to make the best immersive experience possible.

I am going to continue looking at explosions and hopefully some shatter, maybe doing some full comps of static buildings for some practice?

Also just speaking to Phil he’s come up with a name for the political party which is “The Union Party.” I like the idea considering that in a thesaurus definition it somes up “The greater good.” Which is a wicked concept for a narrative. Still excited duuuuuude

Narrative…

Well heres Phils narrative ideas. Kinda has been decided so not sure what kind of input i can put in here….

“2035 – The UK is a large contributer into monetary needs of the EU. However the work force of the UK is suffering and the economy is failing.

2037 – Foreign employers that had factories in the UK are changing their manual labour to the more devleoping countires of the EU. 1 third of the country is now jobless, and the current government if failing.

2038 – One corporation announces is taking it’s record profits and then pumping them back into the communities. At the same time, annouce they are creating jobs and factories, practically re-opening the closed ones. They become a national saviour.

2040 – The corporation forms it’s own political party, with the interests of the country as it’s goal, yet funded privately. The current government is still making bad mistakes.

2042 – The corporation win the general election, through a massive marketting campaign and promsing change from teh previous goverments failures. The public lap this up. Propaganda of this new goverment starts appearing after even after winning.

2043 – Policies made ‘in the interests of the country’ involve more stricter security. At the same time the EU has been needing more money, and people are needing more national identity.

2044 – The Corporation government decides to detach from the EU. The amounting money saved is pumped back in the UK’s needs. After only a few months, the UK seemingly has few problems. More jobs are created, more houses are built, everyone has great healthcare. The increased population are all homed and happy.

2046 – Everyone lives a consumer lifestyle. In such a radical turnaround, the Corp’ government places more restrictions, but everyone is too complacent to even notice the change.

2047 – Several groups of anarchists band together, trying to bring attention to the government taking away civil liberties. The protests are contained, and the media, controlled by the government contains and downplays this. The only result of this is an increased militant style policing and curfews.

2049 – Big protest happens with march on parliament. It becomes aggressive and the crowd get fired into. 50 end up killed. The news travels worldwide and it’s considered a political massacre.

2050 – Anniversary of massacre. The events that we see now unfold…”

location location location

Today we started thinking about where to shoot the plates for the scenes on the project. We started to go towards you know what, a little bit of wikipedia for a starting point and found some possible location. One was St Paul’s Cathedral, which Elliott managed to phone up.

They said they wouldn’t be able to take us because the balcony area was so small, and that the only time it would be available would be outside visiting hours. And even then they wouldn’t be aloud to let us in on visiting hours.

I had a look at the tower bride which appears to be a possible place to shoot considering its a public viewpoint. Also Elliott appears to of found the place “Tower 42″ or The Natwest building as some would call it. This place apparently has 2 restaurants which means hat a good shot may be taken from them if we ask politely. It has a massive over view of London which means we can start to get to work soon if we get a yes from this place.

Hmm fail….

Well after watching the tutorial and learning about everything BUT how to effect the particles movement i had a slight rage. Especially at the turoail guy…who smacks his lips after every sentence…he needs some bloody chapstick. But i did learn about dynamic shading and reflective blinn textures.

Here you can see an intial particle for singular shading. The purpouse of the tutorial was to think about shading indivisual particles using nurbs layers to use as a reference. Considering through mental ray the particles cannot be rendered, its apparently a very efficient way to do it.

Here you can see some shadow mapping on the surface using the spotlight. Something i have never done before.

Here you can see some reflective properties from the particle sphere. Although i was going to texture the plane the textures would import properly for some reason so i’ll figure that out another time. I guess i need to be shown properly on how to control the particles in the fluid chamber. The internet appears to be a useless resource because everyone appears to damand money these days to be an annoyin bloke who smacks his lips constantly talk to you about the wrong section in a 3d program. But i digress, shizzle happens. Another resource may have to be the library tommorow or talking to Liam and Phil seeing if they have a Maya bible anywhere lying around which would be fantastic.

A little bit of experimentation

Ok i managed to animate the explosion using the opacity spawn on the attributes but i wanted some more physics to actually effect the particles, such as wind and turbulence. So now whats asked is how to actually make the fluid chamber affected by different properties? It seems to be extremely stubborn in wanting influence from any other factor. I spent a lot of my day yesterday with a lot of trial and error. Most indeed was error, so here are a few screenshots.

In this image i decided to try and use the fluid chamber with a particle emmitter inside of it. Although this seemed like a god idea at the time it indeed wasnt. Logically i would of thought Maya would have the attributes unaffected by eachother instead of having them linked, or at least producing an option in which you can decide if the fluid chamber and the emitter are connected. But alas Maya makes you beg for it, and begging i am. When i try to set such factors like the emitter opcaity to centre gradient like i did before with the other explosion i made, it decides to spawn a very annoying faded colour in the middle of the fluid box, even when i want it applied to the emmiter alone. Baffling i know, i do want to kill the designer.

You can also see the colurs are a lot less prominent and dont actually follow the incandecense which is also rather annoying as well.

The explosions were just rubbish in the end using an emmitter. But then using JUST a fluid chamber i feel i have no control with its scale or physics properties. I even tried using the hypergraph shader to link up some physic fields to the fluid chamber. None of the fields affected the position or distribution of the particles which again is leaving me extremely confused. There must be something i am missing. Something i havent switched on or linked up. So i’ve decided to follow a 55 minute tutorial today on physics dynamics on Maya in hope the answer will just spring out to me. So i may have an unrelevant looking piece of work but i will explain how it will hopefully help with the control of Maya dynamics. I will find this out, its like i am being teased by this labyrinth of polygons.

Explosions and maya

Well taking in the we were looking for something that was a lot more smaller on the scale of war. In which being small bomb devices and shrapnel that kind of jazz. I decided to give the particle system in maya a go. I heard from certain online forums that mayas fluid system has some amazing capabilities, much more capable than its particle emitter in fact. So i decided to give it another shot. The last time i used it was on the work experience on the white eagle project to create fire elements. I found it extremely difficult then but this time i actually found it to be a lot easier to use.

Here is how it started in the fluid chamber. The fluid chamber consists of physics which can be altered to give the particles some form and motion. Many little attributes can be added like wind properties and gravity, density viscosity you name it. Its like playing god in a strange sense. You can see here this is the binary form of the particles, simple little pieces of information reading the chambers properties and what i want to do with them. At this point you can see the particles simply have emmitted abruptly without altering the frames. This is because the actual particles are already born in a sense, you simply have to animate in keyframes things like its opacity.

Again it was still in its child stages. I had given it colour and some more depth.

This was when i was playing around with its incandescense. The multiple colour channels can be seperated into grouped forms to give the particle group the illusion of having many different properties. Like in this case, the light, fire and the smoke.

In this shot here you can see i put high quality rendering on so i can have a very broad interpretation of what i was altering whilst i was working on the look of the explosion. I found that the explosion itself was starting to take a grundgy look to it and was starting to come together. Although i needed more smokey elements at this point and i had trouble figuring out how to achieve it for a while.

Now here i found out how to bring out the smokey elements, which was to play with the shaders and give it its own adaptive lighting. I was really chuffed when i found this out, it looked a lot more like an explosion than i thought it would.

And here is a tweaked version of the explosion texture. Its not animated yet, but it will be using keyframes on its opcaity and hopefully birth. But now i have this session saved it can be played around with. Like using wind elements to really blend this composite into the scene we will be doing for the project. We could also use this same session but with the different elements of physics we could multiply it and not have to start from scratch each time. My next target is to get this believably animated. Theoretically it should work. Happy Mike =]

A more solid narrative

Well Elliott and Phil came together and managed to think up a very “rebelistic” narrative involving well…rebels trying to bring down a higher establishment of dictatership. So what would be involved? Well obviously a news report most probably bringing up the whole feeling of political tension and that the city has come to a complete stale mate battleground. Elliott has been thinking of maybe compositing smaller explosions into the piece instead of one large nuclear weapon. Small arms fire and such may have a lot more of an impact onto the whole scenerio and would be a lot more interesting to composite.

What has to be asked is what kind of weapons would be used? What kind of backdrop will be involved? Well looking at this story its very close to the hit video game “Half Life2.” Notice the background and slum like conditions as well as the depressing wallpapers and textures. A dictatership screen as well telling people on how “lucky they are” to live in a society like this.

So looking at the background we should composite the visuals over the footage or still photography. Thats another thing to mention. Instead of actually going to film london we only simply need a large photo of the landscape and then composite on top of the initial image.

Also the explosions have to be considered with the modern war fare. What kind of small arms fire would there be? Would it be small arms fire like rpgs?

Interesting, now to try and make explosions…